I think this is really exciting. I have two young kids, and my parents (who live a thousand miles away) like to do weekly video chats with their grandkids. Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to keep a preschooler and an elementary schooler to stay in the frame of a laptop's or tablet's webcam? This would allow them to video chat with their grandparents while jumping up and down, showing off the forward rolls they learned at gymnastics, running to get their new LEGO set to show off, etc, without constantly leaving the webcam's vision.

We use the video chat on the Xbox 360 quite frequently from the living room. It's an absolutely great experience for my toddler and her grandmother that is a few thousand miles away. Granted, the experience is a bit better for my mother-in-law as we only see her on her laptop camera blown up to 55" of compressed video glory.

... the Skype client could leverage the Kinect sensor to become a good conference room video tool...

Companies would save billions in aggregate if they used video-conferencing instead of flying people all over.

Back in the 70's and 80's traveling on the company's dime used to be glamorous, exciting, a mood enhancer. Nowadays it's a pain in the neck. Air travel is a freakin' torture. When my boss tells me that I have to be somewhere by 8am tomorrow I curse the day he was conceived. Skyping with the Xbox One would make us all 100 times more productive. I hope it catches on.

It's great that Microsoft is improving Skype on various appliances, but it's a pity that they have damaged the UX on smart phones. I have to struggle to make my phone stay on speaker while skyping, since it changes randomly and the controls tend to disappear depending on the phone's orientation.

While it's great that MS is spending all this effort to add new bells and whistles to Skype, I wish they paid more attention to the basics. Sound quality has not improved at all, and transmission of dialed digits to automated phone systems (sadly, an important use case) has gotten significantly poorer in the past year. Compatibility among different versions of the app has taken a turn for the worse as well.

While it's great that MS is spending all this effort to add new bells and whistles to Skype, I wish they paid more attention to the basics. Sound quality has not improved at all, and transmission of dialed digits to automated phone systems (sadly, an important use case) has gotten significantly poorer in the past year. Compatibility among different versions of the app has taken a turn for the worse as well.

There's significant annoyances with running Skype on multiple devices too (eg everything other than the device you answer on keeps running for ages), which is basically normal now.

I could easily see Microsoft developing a sort of "Xbox Enterprise" or "Xbox Workstation" package for the Xbox. Details could obviously vary quite a bit, but what I'm imagining is some sort of workstation type packaging for the console, in which it's designed to be the plug-in point for conference rooms, utilizing HDMI (with adapters for legacy connector types available, probably included) and USB instead of the complicated cabling or myriad of ports usually found in such situations. It would also probably be more like a traditional PC, with Office (at least a Starter edition, with bulk licensing presumably being commonplace) and possibly support for multiple devices to be connected via SmartGlass. Alternatively, with the current shake-up going on at Microsoft, I think it's at least possible that Microsoft could enter the PC market as an OBM, with a more heavily PC-ified version of the Xbox, shipped with Microsoft mouse and keyboard.

... the Skype client could leverage the Kinect sensor to become a good conference room video tool...

Companies would save billions in aggregate if they used video-conferencing instead of flying people all over.

Back in the 70's and 80's traveling on the company's dime used to be glamorous, exciting, a mood enhancer. Nowadays it's a pain in the neck. Air travel is a freakin' torture. When my boss tells me that I have to be somewhere by 8am tomorrow I curse the day he was conceived. Skyping with the Xbox One would make us all 100 times more productive. I hope it catches on.

I thought video conferencing was "the thing" these days? I wouldn't know personally, but that's the impression I've gotten from the sheer availability of hardware and software, especially products that seem to be targeted at corporate use.

*In response to the original, nested quote, and that paragraph within the article in general.

... the Skype client could leverage the Kinect sensor to become a good conference room video tool...

Companies would save billions in aggregate if they used video-conferencing instead of flying people all over.

Back in the 70's and 80's traveling on the company's dime used to be glamorous, exciting, a mood enhancer. Nowadays it's a pain in the neck. Air travel is a freakin' torture. When my boss tells me that I have to be somewhere by 8am tomorrow I curse the day he was conceived. Skyping with the Xbox One would make us all 100 times more productive. I hope it catches on.

I thought video conferencing was "the thing" these days? I wouldn't know personally, but that's the impression I've gotten from the sheer availability of hardware and software, especially products that seem to be targeted at corporate use.

*In response to the original, nested quote, and that paragraph within the article in general.

I think you answered your question with the "sheer availability of hardware and software." In my experience, the sheer variety of incompatible systems for video conferencing has meant that it isn't widely used except maybe internally in Fortune 500 type companies. I work for a small company that has clients of various sizes located around the world. Many times a video conference would be useful*, but we haven't found that any of our corporate clients have any kind of system in place that we could just quickly put something together on the fly. Skype's the closest thing to a universal app, but the systems people are using them on (mostly mobile phones) doesn't exactly lend itself to boardroom conferences.

*Writing this from India with a serious case of jet lag, for a meeting that probably could have been done OK via video.

It's easy to see ways in which the Skype client could leverage the Kinect sensor to become a good conference room video tool, for example by using the beamforming microphones to detect where a speaker is and cropping the video accordingly.

There are already solutions like this, at least for Lync, I had conferences through those. Don't know the model, some sort of 360 degrees camera array that stands in the middle of conference table and crops the feed to the person speaking. It was sort of awesome.

Except that Skype, without expensive transcoding services like Bluejeans.com cannot talk to anybody other than Skype.

That factors out the majority of SIP/H.323 based video conferencing corporate systems worldwide.

I'd be all for Skype/Google Hangouts if they would stop playing the proprietary lock-in game. The corporate systems are far more expensive but you get a MUCH better camera, microphone system, higher bandwidth (I can do 1080p60 at 6Mb/s...Skype can't even come close).

The bottom line in video conferencing is a battle between "Good Enough" and "A great experience".

Granted all of this levels out on the Internet with somebody's horrible wireless with a crappy webcam, but there IS a difference between Skype and buying a serious video conferencing system for Business.

While it's great that MS is spending all this effort to add new bells and whistles to Skype, I wish they paid more attention to the basics. Sound quality has not improved at all, and transmission of dialed digits to automated phone systems (sadly, an important use case) has gotten significantly poorer in the past year. Compatibility among different versions of the app has taken a turn for the worse as well.

I use Skype (and happily pay extra) to call my family across the globe because its call quality is so much better than my Vonage or other lines for that matter. The Skype to Skype quality is especially superb (and its free). Of course, it does depends on the connection speed on both ends of the call.

I"m a bit confused because everything I'm reading says you can't snap skype to the side. But every advertisement I've seen shows people doing exactly that. Ray Lewis and Brian Urlacher are skyping while playing madden in their commercial. And in the Invitation ad they show the two kids skype eachother during the soccer goal.

That is a very cool feature, considering that my family regularly Skypes relatives, and continually finding innovative ways to mount the bloody iPad to capture the 5-10 people in the house is getting excessive.

I think this is really exciting. I have two young kids, and my parents (who live a thousand miles away) like to do weekly video chats with their grandkids. Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to keep a preschooler and an elementary schooler to stay in the frame of a laptop's or tablet's webcam? This would allow them to video chat with their grandparents while jumping up and down, showing off the forward rolls they learned at gymnastics, running to get their new LEGO set to show off, etc, without constantly leaving the webcam's vision.

This is the killer feature of the next gen consoles.

Addendum Edit: And it's disappointing this wasn't highlighted better in the comprehensive Xbox One review.

So your phone, laptop and tablet never make it into the living room or bedroom, huh?

I don't use skype, no.

You don't seriously think this stuff is limited to Skype, do you?

Do you?

No, I do not. But so far, the only VoIP service that's been confirmed to have been wiretapped by the NSA is Skype. So I don't get the excitement for a "new skype experience in the living room". Nobody should use Skype after the NSA revelations, the more be excited about new features.

So your phone, laptop and tablet never make it into the living room or bedroom, huh?

I don't use skype, no.

You don't seriously think this stuff is limited to Skype, do you?

Do you?

No, I do not. But so far, the only VoIP service that's been confirmed to have been wiretapped by the NSA is Skype. So I don't get the excitement for a "new skype experience in the living room". Nobody should use Skype after the NSA revelations, the more be excited about new features.

So long story short, you're okay with allowing the NSA to listen and look into your living room and bedroom?

So your phone, laptop and tablet never make it into the living room or bedroom, huh?

I don't use skype, no.

You don't seriously think this stuff is limited to Skype, do you?

Do you?

No, I do not. But so far, the only VoIP service that's been confirmed to have been wiretapped by the NSA is Skype. So I don't get the excitement for a "new skype experience in the living room". Nobody should use Skype after the NSA revelations, the more be excited about new features.

Pretty sure you're trolling but I'll bite. Google and yahoo have been confirmed to been breached by the NSA, should we all stop using their services? Why are you even on the internet, any unencrypted communication by you is potentially being intercepted by the NSA. Why not pull your internet and save us all this nonsense. We already know what the NSA does.

... the Skype client could leverage the Kinect sensor to become a good conference room video tool...

Companies would save billions in aggregate if they used video-conferencing instead of flying people all over.

Back in the 70's and 80's traveling on the company's dime used to be glamorous, exciting, a mood enhancer. Nowadays it's a pain in the neck. Air travel is a freakin' torture. When my boss tells me that I have to be somewhere by 8am tomorrow I curse the day he was conceived. Skyping with the Xbox One would make us all 100 times more productive. I hope it catches on.

I thought video conferencing was "the thing" these days? I wouldn't know personally, but that's the impression I've gotten from the sheer availability of hardware and software, especially products that seem to be targeted at corporate use.

*In response to the original, nested quote, and that paragraph within the article in general.

I think you answered your question with the "sheer availability of hardware and software." In my experience, the sheer variety of incompatible systems for video conferencing has meant that it isn't widely used except maybe internally in Fortune 500 type companies. I work for a small company that has clients of various sizes located around the world. Many times a video conference would be useful*, but we haven't found that any of our corporate clients have any kind of system in place that we could just quickly put something together on the fly. Skype's the closest thing to a universal app, but the systems people are using them on (mostly mobile phones) doesn't exactly lend itself to boardroom conferences.

*Writing this from India with a serious case of jet lag, for a meeting that probably could have been done OK via video.

Standardized videoconferencing hardware at every court reporter's office and every major law firm (and the same for other industries) would be really awesome, particularly given the quality of the Kinect 2.0 camera. But still, I think Microsoft would need to sweeten the deal to get skeptical, penny-pinching office managers and budget committees to sign on. Web browsing is good (big-screen view of website X in the conference room), but not enough on its own. How about read-only support for PowerPoint presentations and other Office documents (once again, to facilitate presentations)? Maybe something else too?

Standardized videoconferencing hardware at every court reporter's office and every major law firm (and the same for other industries) would be really awesome, particularly given the quality of the Kinect 2.0 camera. But still, I think Microsoft would need to sweeten the deal to get skeptical, penny-pinching office managers and budget committees to sign on. Web browsing is good (big-screen view of website X in the conference room), but not enough on its own. How about read-only support for PowerPoint presentations and other Office documents (once again, to facilitate presentations)? Maybe something else too?

Well... it has a web browser. Which means it can, right now, use the Office Web Apps to do all of that stuff online. I agree that a more built-in solution would be nice (and really, all they have to do is update the Skydrive application to do that), but there is a solution for doing office documents on it right now-- and it's not read-only, it's full editing.

Google and yahoo have been confirmed to been breached by the NSA, should we all stop using their services?

We probably should, but I actually haven't gone that far.

The issue here is putting a camera in your living room and using a service that we know is being wiretapped by the NSA. A service being used to capture not only chat but also video and audio. You'd have to be crazy to use Skype knowing this.

Google and yahoo have been confirmed to been breached by the NSA, should we all stop using their services?

We probably should, but I actually haven't gone that far.

The issue here is putting a camera in your living room and using a service that we know is being wiretapped by the NSA. A service being used to capture not only chat but also video and audio. You'd have to be crazy to use Skype knowing this.

Yeah, I can't wait for the NSA to parse my conversations with my kids about homework or what's on the TV at that time. Maybe they can catch me watching the South Park about Cartman joining the NSA. Honestly I feel sorry for the poor NSA operative that is forced to listen to the conversations in my living room.

Google and yahoo have been confirmed to been breached by the NSA, should we all stop using their services?

We probably should, but I actually haven't gone that far.

The issue here is putting a camera in your living room and using a service that we know is being wiretapped by the NSA. A service being used to capture not only chat but also video and audio. You'd have to be crazy to use Skype knowing this.

Yeah, I can't wait for the NSA to parse my conversations with my kids about homework or what's on the TV at that time. Maybe they can catch me watching the South Park about Cartman joining the NSA. Honestly I feel sorry for the poor NSA operative that is forced to listen to the conversations in my living room.

Well they already have trouble handling the amount of data they already have. Why would more make it easier?

I think this is really exciting. I have two young kids, and my parents (who live a thousand miles away) like to do weekly video chats with their grandkids. Do you have ANY idea how hard it is to keep a preschooler and an elementary schooler to stay in the frame of a laptop's or tablet's webcam? This would allow them to video chat with their grandparents while jumping up and down, showing off the forward rolls they learned at gymnastics, running to get their new LEGO set to show off, etc, without constantly leaving the webcam's vision.

I'm in the same position; we're in Honolulu, and my Mum's back home in Scotland. We Skype each weekend so she can see the kids.

For the first couple of years after my daughter was born, we used to skype from my wife's laptop. That worked until my daughter started getting really mobile, and then they never got to see her after that. Trying to keep her away from the laptop was also an exercise in frustration; a toddler's always going to want to touch all of the buttons, which led to a lot of dropped calls.

I ended up reusing an old desktop machine that I connected to the TV. I sat the webcam on top of the telly, and controlled the whole thing from an app on my phone instead of having a keyboard and mouse sitting about the place.

It worked well. They get a kick from seeing themselves on the TV, and they get to bounce about the place without having to sit in front of a laptop. There's no worries about touching stuff, and on the whole my Mum ends up seeing more of them each week.

That machine was a decade old, and it ended up dying, so I built a cheap mini-ITX machine to replace the old desktop (its Athlon XP1800 was definitely past its prime, resulting in a slideshow at times). Its Celeron G1610 is plenty fast enough, and its cheap SSD results in quick boot times, which is handy for a machine that spends most of its life turned off and is started up just to to a specific task. A new webcam with autofocus (a Logitech C920) means they can now hold things right up to the camera to show Gran, and she can actually see them properly.

To be honest, I would have considered an Xbox One if it had been available at the time. The computing hardware cost under $300, but a Windows licence and a new webcam added a good bit to that; I'd say the grand total was in the $400 range. Another $100 for a usable console would have been worth paying to me, but there was no way I could have waited more than half a year for the Xbox to be launched.

I could easily see Microsoft developing a sort of "Xbox Enterprise" or "Xbox Workstation" package for the Xbox. Details could obviously vary quite a bit, but what I'm imagining is some sort of workstation type packaging for the console, in which it's designed to be the plug-in point for conference rooms, utilizing HDMI (with adapters for legacy connector types available, probably included) and USB instead of the complicated cabling or myriad of ports usually found in such situations. It would also probably be more like a traditional PC, with Office (at least a Starter edition, with bulk licensing presumably being commonplace) and possibly support for multiple devices to be connected via SmartGlass. Alternatively, with the current shake-up going on at Microsoft, I think it's at least possible that Microsoft could enter the PC market as an OBM, with a more heavily PC-ified version of the Xbox, shipped with Microsoft mouse and keyboard.

This market would likely be better served with a Windows 8.1 device paired with a Second Generation Kinect sensor. That would offer better manageability for the enterprise.